Your Android Screen May Go Dark in 2019

In a posting on the official Chromium bug tracker, Google engineer Lukasz Zbylut may have unofficially confirmed dark mode for the next version of Android, code-named Android Q.

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“Dark mode is an approved Q feature,” Zbylut wrote. “The Q team wants to ensure that all preloaded apps support dark mode natively. In order to ship dark mode successfully, we need all UI elements to be ideally themed dark by May 2019.”

The comment — spotted by Android Police — refers to a feature that will make the light-colored palette of Android’s Material Design interface dark, with black as its base instead of white.

But more importantly, dark mode will help save battery life in phones with OLED screens. Unlike LCD displays, OLED screens have pixels that emit light on their own without backlights. When they are completely black, they are completely off and don’t consume any electricity whatsoever. If 80 percent of an OLED screen is black, you will have roughly an 80 percent savings on the display's power bill.